Good experience for college graduates or those wanting to learn a new job in an IT environment.Good introduction to other industries

Cons

No advancement opportunitiesNot family friendlyManagement has no experience; nothing is consistentReviews are done once a year; employees fill out reviews and then management hits a button. HR never reviewes the reviews for issues or concerns of employee

Upper management treats the service business as if it were a manufacturing company.Failing business model (Recovery-side) with continual re-organizations and downsizing.Unhealthy atmosphere which has created a miserable work force.The new business model's aim is to create a jack-of-all trades technician (+customer service specialist) that will destroy the one strength that the company had - depth of knowledge and talent.Insane increase of the number of team meetings - 33% of your time is spent in a meeting rather than in front of the customer.

A handful of quality employees remain. They were somehow sucked in and are disillusioned enough to stay in an effort to somehow make it better. But they will be hitting a wall as long as completely incompetent and unethical mgmt walk the halls.

Cons

Management across the board are unbelievably incompetent. They have zero software industry knowledge and it shows in every breath they take. They bank on the fact that it would cost millions for a client to migrate to a competing product, so all development is half ass at best. Thousands of serious software bugs that are closed as soon as they are logged citing 'no interest', 'no resources'. As though they were never recreated, and never existed. No upfront analysis by experienced BAs No detailed code models. Zip. Run from this company - it will ruin you forever.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Please resign and move on to something, anything you may be good at in another industry. Clients would leave in droves if they knew how unethical you are. That the corrupt software is a direct reflection of your inability to understand the software industry - and how to run a legitamate financial services company with integrity.

HR was bad. She was unapproachable and not receptive to employees concerns and issues. Raises were unfair. Employees that knew how to get around the work were rewarded while the employees that did their work on time in addition to helping other were never given any type of recognition. The hours were flexible, but were always abused by a few and those few were never approached. Management knew about this, but choose to ignore it. When you you bring your concerns to management, they would tell you to just worry about yourself. Thus rewarding the employees that don't do work.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Pay attention to all your employees and not just the ones that do the work all the time. Pay attention to the ones that come in late and leave early. Pay attention to the ones that water plants all day and look out the window. Make sure they are pulling thier weight in the scope of the company and stop rewarding them for things that do not accomplish. There is a problem when management keeps and employee whose work comes back and someone else has to restest the work again.

There isn't any really best reason to work for Sungard. It's a fast pase enviroment, that leaves no time to think. You need to be on the ball, and ready to jump to any problem at a moments notice. You need to know your duties extremely well, and complete your tasks with minimum resources, tools or help. Must be independent and self motivating. I must say, it's a really fast pace environment, with no planning for the future. So you must be ready for anything and everything. You must have confidence in your skills and your ability, because you will need to defend you actions.

Cons

They over work you, and burn you out, they don't respect it's employees or trust them. They're solution to solving a problem, is to to find which employees to blame, rather than to resolve the issue. There is no planning for the future, only the present. So issues and problems re-occurs all the time, because they do not want to solve problem, they rather find someone to blame. It's easier and cheaper to find an escape goat than root cause the problem solve the issue. They also like to burn it's employees out since they know there are others in the market who can easily replace them.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Management has no trust in it's employees and do not listen to their suggestions. They do not care for them, since they provide no training and time off. They do not want to help them, succeed in their job, they just want the work to get completed with no help from management. They encourage using the most cheapest resources to solve problem. They provided to no tools to help in the day to day tasks. It would be nice if they listen and even try to use the suggestions, provided by it's employees. It would also be nice to give time and say thanks for a good job.

The company that was purchased by SunGard had generous vacation allowances. SunGard allowed us to keep them. There are a number of good people in the ranks of the division, many of whom are good people to work with. The projects are challenging, and with a small staff, there is room to play a number of roles.

Cons

As some have pointed out, there are a number of different divisions in the company. Each is its own entity. Our division was purchased by SunGard, and then SunGard was its self purchased. There was a strategy of reducing head count via attrition and layoffs, in an attempt to make the division more profitable. Besides being demoralizing, it also makes it difficult to advance your career in a company that is shipping whole departments overseas. Our location shrank about 70% before I left.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

There is only so many people who are redundant. After a while it becomes necessary to limit the scope of the business if you are going to keep reducing headcount. Many of your employees are as intelligent as you are, if not more so. Don't make the mistake of keeping your employees out of the loop.

Had the ability to travel internationally to other offices, so I gota few fully paid trips out of them. Some of the people are down to Earth, but the Management fosters a back-stabbing political climate. Very easy hours: 9-5 at the worst.

Cons

Worst Management I have ever seen. A complete lack of concern for the customer. Poor and antiquated technology. Zero opportunity for advancement. Extremely poor compensation and benefits. There was no communication from management about anything. You had to rely on the rumor mill to learn anything. Lousy office environment since they were too cheap to invest in anything.

The people, non-management co-workers. The co-workers are very professional and a joy to work with. Each department has great employees that work well together but with tools that are inadaquate to perform their job functions.

Cons

Upper management (SVP level) is only concern with the bottom line and that is to get the money in and keep it in. No raise is higher than 4% each year and is seldom given to the staff that deserves it. In most cases the management rather have you get the product out without understanding the full concept of each product. There is a revolving door at Sungard.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Listen to your managers, don't over work your workers. Let go of products that are not producing properly and improve on those that have made money for SunGard.